In this episode, I sit down with a good friend of mine to talk about why the alt-right has become so dominant in American politics. We talk about how it came about, what it means, and why we should be worried about it.
00:00:00.000There are these strange contradictions that seem to be occurring, and it's like the right is ostensibly, I guess, more based and nationalistic, and they talk about manliness a lot and things like that.
00:00:19.780But that seems to almost be a kind of cope or flourish that is hiding a greater dysfunction or something.
00:00:34.540So, I mean, even if you look at the history of class and voting, we've had a flip, but it hasn't been a complete flip.
00:00:46.460So even in 1992 with Bill Clinton, he would still get 75% of the working class white vote, but he'd also get 75% to 90% to 100% of the egghead vote, let's say, the academics, intellectuals, he'd get a lot of professionals and so on.
00:01:10.100And now we've seen that flip. And so the Republican Party is, in many ways, a party of the multiracial working class.
00:01:22.060But it's not a party. I mean, like, I don't think we can underestimate the amount of Hispanics and Asians and Indians and so on in, like, Fuentes groups or, you know, BAP or whatever.
00:01:38.880Like, it's a weird, it's a weird phenomenon.
00:01:41.320And on the alt-right, as I call it, I mean, it's, it's full, you know, riddled with it.
00:01:48.960So, but what I guess what the right didn't do, so it, it brought on that 75% of the working class vote, but it didn't bring on any eggheads.
00:01:58.980And in fact, it's, like, actively alienated them.
00:02:03.020And so you kind of have this weird situation where I think that the Democrats, who could kind of balance high and low, where they could, you know, you would have the Marxist intellectual at Columbia who's voting for Democrats.
00:02:20.500And then you'd have the guy from Arkansas with a small farm, you know, who's voting for Democrats, you know, that's a, it's a weird high-low coalition that I think is actually really effective.
00:02:34.460It's not contradictory, it's effective.
00:02:36.700But with the GOP, it's like the low coalition at this point.
00:02:42.760And so it's just going to be resentment and aggressive stupidity and nonsense, basically.
00:02:54.160I was actually just tweeting about this the other day, that I think a lot of women reflexively don't like the GOP because they just see it as the party of, like, bitter losers.
00:03:08.300I think they see a lot of men over there that they wouldn't want to be around.
00:03:12.760And then that's kind of what happened with me.
00:03:14.640I just saw a lot of men, like, I wouldn't want to be around those men.
00:03:17.840Like, I don't really want to be, like, associated with this world and this party.
00:03:23.320In many ways, it's just become, I don't know, like, it's not, it's not a very aspirational, like, group of people you'd want to be, like, a part of, I would say.
00:03:38.780And then the other aspect is it, the other aspect of it is that for better and for worse, the elite intellectuals are able to kind of romanticize the working class or African Americans or refugees or whatever.
00:03:57.800They're able to kind of create a narrative and a story about, you know, their plight and their struggle and overcoming and all that kind of stuff.
00:04:07.780Whereas, you know, maybe, maybe not to their fault, white working class is not getting, or in middle class is not getting romanticized like that.
00:04:19.460But then they don't kind of have the capacity to romanticize.
00:04:23.820There's no, like, high-low connection, if you understand.
00:04:27.700It's just like, you know, we hate the liberals.
00:04:59.960But at least the people who stand out and the kind of politics that they're trying to appeal to is the politics of maybe at best being uncouth or something.
00:05:10.880You know, like, do you remember that video that, you know, I mean, and at worst being what losers or insurrectionists or whatever, but maybe at best, like, not being kind of uncouth.
00:05:21.620I mean, I don't know if you remember that video that was passed around with this girl that it was like a southern redneck kind of wigger-like thing.
00:05:32.260And she was rapping about, like, Arkansas culture or something like that.
00:05:38.640And it was like, you know, we fire our guns and we drink our beer and I'm a heartbreaker, y'all.
00:05:44.360You know what, who, but I'm not even doing it well because it was like a rap.
00:05:50.000But it was like, I guarantee you that everyone in that video over the age of 18 is a Trump voter.
00:05:57.340You know, like, yeah, it's, it's that kind of vibe, uh, as it were.
00:06:05.080Um, but so, yeah, I mean, I think we're in a really difficult place because the, the left has all, all, well, not always, but for a very long time has dominated the intellectual sphere.
00:06:18.020They, they have had a lot of people in academia and we can, I think it's actually interesting to talk about how that is.
00:06:26.180Um, I don't quite buy the whole long March thesis.
00:06:29.700I think it's something else, but, but now it's, it's almost like more aggressive.
00:06:34.820Like at least in the fifties with the GOP, there was almost like a pretense of, you know, oh, we're going to talk about this Catholic intellectual and we're going to talk about, you know, Ivanhoe novels.
00:06:48.740And there, there was at least like a pretense or, or we're going to go and talk about Rothbard and, and, um, Friedman or whatever.
00:06:57.140Like we're, we're, we're going to do some, you know, highly intellectualized economic system, but at this point I, I can't like, I can't see anything that is there right now.
00:07:10.980It's just like brutal resentment and violence.
00:07:44.200It's not, and it's not, it's not effective.
00:07:47.440It doesn't, what are you going to build with that?
00:07:49.900Um, you're just going to alienate more and more people that actually.
00:07:54.440Have power, have influence, have the ability to do something.
00:08:00.360Um, it's just, it's so weird when you, I remember when I was looking some years ago, I was looking into, um, kind of the demographic data of, you know, who voted Republican in the past and who votes now.
00:08:14.680And it's weird how much it's changed, um, because it used to be way more women would vote Republican.
00:08:21.060Um, it also used to be the college educated was the Republican party.
00:08:25.880Um, that's not really the case anymore.
00:08:29.900Um, I don't really know exactly why that's happened.
00:08:32.940I mean, I, I do blame quite a bit of it actually on Reagan.
00:08:36.620Um, but I think it's, it's bigger than that alone.
00:08:42.220I think it's a long, it's a decades long trajectory actually with, with realignment basically.
00:08:48.820And, and, and the Southern strategy and all that kind of stuff.
00:08:52.200And you can, you can say like Trump created it or the tea party created it or Newt Gingrich created it or Reagan created, but it's, it, I mean, I think, yeah, it's, it's just a, it's a long-term trajectory.
00:09:04.600Um, so let's talk a little bit about what we, I, you mentioned this earlier of hypergamy or pickiness, let's say.
00:09:18.420And I think it's a little, it's a little more complicated maybe than it's, than it's usually understood.
00:09:26.920So, and maybe there's some kind of darker sides to it and things like that.
00:09:31.860So, I mean, I, I can remember, um, uh, pheasant hunting, uh, a few years ago.
00:09:39.420And I remember, you know, a lot of these rules you just accept and you don't really think about.
00:09:45.100And then I was kind of thinking about it.
00:09:47.160I was like, you know, this is deeply unfair, you know, like we're killing all the males and we're just allowing the females to go free.
00:09:57.280And to add insult to injury, all of the males are, have all these beautiful feathers that they've developed.
00:10:04.860And so they, they put on a show basically, and we're rewarding them by shooting them.
00:10:09.240And then these lowly gray females just get off scot-free.
00:10:12.880Now that, that's obviously a, a bit of a, um, cheeky way of looking at these kinds of things.
00:10:18.680But basically what I'm getting at is that the, the female really is a highly valuable resource.
00:10:27.940And so, although we are pheasant hunting, almost ostensibly like committing male genocide or something like that, we're, we're not harming the species that way.
00:10:38.120Because the, you know, it's kind of like sperm is cheap, eggs are valuable, but to put it very simply.
00:10:46.600And so, and I think this, this also gets a kind of an inner fantasy of both men and women that, that real, that I, I do think we are just kind of fundamentally wired differently.
00:10:59.640And obviously doesn't mean that we can't talk with each other or cooperate or anything, but, you know, so the, the inner fantasy of a male would be Don Juan or James Bond or something like this of, and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, guys, because, but, you know, of spreading your seed far and wide and having lots of sex all over the place.
00:11:26.940And I think the, the inner fantasy of women is something different and, you know, great, I'm, I'm probably making these things a little cartoonish here, but if you guys want to deepen them, you're, you're more than welcome to.
00:11:42.160But it's that, that notion of being chosen by a strong man, being rescued maybe, or taming a strong man, or, you know, maybe, taming, you think?
00:12:01.520I think, I think it's like a, and it's funny because conservatives like to bring up, like, Fifty Shades of Grey a lot as this, like, women want to be dominated kind of evidence.
00:12:15.440I think Fifty Shades of Grey, if you actually look at the full story, like, start to end, it's the story of a woman dominating a man through her feminine powers.
00:12:24.200I get that sexually, he's doing all this weird stuff with her, right?
00:13:04.020But, but yeah, I mean, I think it, there's a reason why those were extremely popular, you know, 10 years ago or whatever, you know, it's getting at something.
00:13:14.040Even if it is bad literature, it's getting at some inner fantasy on some level, you know, like all popular culture.
00:13:21.500I mean, you can make fun of comic book movies or, or action adventure, romance novels or whatever, but you, you have to kind of recognize their success.
00:13:36.540I, and I think you're, you're right about that.
00:13:39.980And, and so I, I mean, I've, I've talked about this in, I think I even talked about it in the space that we did like a year or so ago.
00:13:48.800And I've talked about it with, with other people as well, but there, we're in this curious, you know, point in world history where, you know, we, we like to think of monogamy as the way of nature, you know, they get, you know, it's, there's 50, 50 chance of a man and a woman more or less.
00:14:18.460There's some truth to that, but it's not the entire truth.
00:14:22.600And, you know, we got at that differential between value, you know, earlier with, with pheasant hunting, but, but also like most men are not going to reproduce.
00:14:35.700Most men are throughout in, in the natural world today and throughout human history will fail at this task.
00:14:45.100And there's a kind of bottleneck effect where most of them are not reproducing due to high child mortality, due to poverty, due to dying in war, due to dying of plague, et cetera.
00:14:58.940They're not getting there and there's a bottleneck effect of women being the choosers and, you know, it's, it's hard to actually, you know, successfully reproduce.
00:15:13.940And I think a lot of the right has this, you know, half remembered dream of the 1950s when we did, you know, to a large extent, have a kind of universal monogamy.
00:15:28.160We had also put Europe into rubble and were the biggest economy.
00:15:42.000I mean, it was just a different world.
00:15:43.940But we created this, like, rising living standard concept.
00:15:47.980And there, and there was, you know, not, not always seen in practice, but there, there was a kind of everyone gets a little piece of the pie.
00:15:55.900And, and I also agree that, like, real polygamy, you know, practice to the extreme is, like, not at all a stable social formation.
00:16:08.620So a big, you know, an Asiatic big man who has, like, a harem of 2,000 women, and you have all these single men who are horny, like, yeah, they're going to kill them.
00:16:21.440You know, it's like, you know, it's a matter of time.
00:16:26.820You know, there, there's a kind of, you, you, you reach a, you reach a balance in culture and monogamy has played a part in that.
00:16:36.240But then also there's, there's a degree of that, there's a strong degree of that kind of bottleneck effect.
00:16:42.840And, you know, fast forward to this crazy place where we are now.
00:16:47.480So we have a hyper-sexualized culture.
00:16:52.020I mean, I, I'm offended by it in many ways.
00:16:54.720I, I think it, you know, um, I am worried about my children in a few years, you know, getting on TikTok and seeing this stuff or hardcore pornography is ubiquitous on the web.
00:17:08.020But we're also in this kind of weird asexual culture where young people are having less sex, like, by multiples in comparison with Gen X or Boomers or Silent Gen even.
00:19:01.760Um, I think it is, so like with hunter gatherers, you actually do see like a pretty natural mix of both like monogamy, serial monogamy, um, kind of polyamory.
00:19:17.280Um, this is, this, it seems that people just kind of go into these different little pockets in a state of nature.
00:19:25.260I think we're just kind of returning to that.
00:19:27.460I think you're going to see some people who keep pursuing serial monogamy.
00:19:30.840Some people who want to get married for life and you're going to see, you know, and this is what we're seeing in tech and that stuff.
00:19:37.080You're seeing all these people who are very interested in polyamory now.
00:19:40.460I think that's just kind of how people default to.
00:19:44.040There's just people who are naturally more monogamous.
00:19:46.900There's people who naturally aren't all that monogamous.
00:19:49.920Um, and I don't think we need, I don't think we, we need to so strictly enforce monogamy anymore.
00:20:00.140Um, I really don't think that that's necessary.
00:20:04.220Um, I think that's just actually how people kind of naturally behave.
00:20:10.960Um, I don't think there's one actual sexuality that every person behaves by or is supposed to behave by.
00:20:20.060Um, but I do understand, I actually do feel for incels and this is, I know I get a lot of hate online for being like this very cruel person who like just doesn't care about men or their plight.
00:20:34.340Um, I've, I've actually helped two of my mutuals get girlfriends successfully that they're still dating.
00:20:42.500Um, so I, I really do feel for people.
00:20:44.920I'm someone who personally is very monogamous.
00:20:47.180I do have the idea of being married, uh, for life to someone.
00:20:51.000I think that's very romantic and sweet.
00:20:54.040And I think that probably is the ideal for most people.
00:20:57.260Um, and I would like to see people pair up, but we're, we're in such a rough spot.
00:21:04.380There's just no good narratives anymore for what you're supposed to be doing.
00:21:09.440And young people are so lost and it is weird that our culture is so sexual.
00:21:14.000Like there's so much sexual imagery everywhere.
00:28:54.480I think these guys are just so under socialized.
00:28:57.600They just, it's like how autistic people just like repeat things they see on TV a lot.
00:29:03.240Um, and they just don't understand that that's not quite how it is in the real world or how like, quote, normal people act.
00:29:12.160I think they just see these memes instead of TV, like they see it on like YouTube or Twitter and it just becomes like this brain warms thing that they obsess over and are just like constantly repeating.
00:29:22.980And they just have no sense of normalcy because I've actually had, I've actually had to tell these men, like you go out into the normal world with a normal guy.
00:29:31.900Like this man is not expecting a virgin.
00:29:34.940No, he doesn't want a woman who slept with like a ton of people, but he's not expecting a body count of zero.
00:29:42.120And he's not offended that it's not zero.
00:29:44.800Like most people have a, you know, single digit or so body count.
00:29:50.520And I hate that word, but whatever it's, it's pretty normal.
00:29:54.660Like they're not freaking out about it.
00:29:58.700And that's actually how it's really always been.
00:30:02.220Um, people have always been having sex and they've always been having sex out of marriage.
00:30:06.960Like there's that statistic about, uh, I think in like the middle ages, they were saying like a third of women, um, at the altar were, were pregnant or something like that.
00:30:18.380Like it, this has always been going on.
00:30:33.800And, and, and so we, we have this notion of like the middle ages as every, every woman was a virgin and every man was honorable, but these, they actually, I mean, and it's hard to find statistics in the middle ages, of course.
00:30:46.900But, but like to the degree that you can find them, a lot of these things will kind of wax and wane.
00:30:52.300And maybe we're going through one of those cycles right now, ironically of less sex.
00:30:59.860We're actually at a time where people are having less of it.
00:31:03.760And your boomer parents had more partners than you did likely.
00:31:07.700So it's weird that they are so longing for like, I don't know, the fifties and sixties and this mid century American dream.
00:31:18.660When people then were actually having more sex than these zoomer kids are now who are like, yeah, hold up in their houses and not interacting with people outside of the internet.
00:31:33.520So this, this fixation on virginity and body count, it's just, but also you want the birth rates up.
00:31:42.200It's just, it doesn't, it's not computing.
00:31:47.420This isn't going to go where you, where you, like where you want it to.
00:31:51.180Um, you're kind of like burning your own goal here.
00:31:56.100A lot of marriages in the past were just literally started by people having sex and knocking someone up and people kind of being sluts.
00:32:03.660Uh, that's how it's been for most human history.
00:32:06.800And yeah, like you said, these things wax and wane and it's natural.
00:32:10.520And I think a lot of conservatism, um, is this inability to, I don't know, just accept that, that we don't really have control over all of these things.
00:32:22.100These things are kind of naturally cycle and it's like this eternal cycle that just occurs with people with all sorts of things.
00:32:29.820Um, it's, that's just how it's always has been and how it probably always will be as long as we exist.
00:32:36.580Um, or unless we become like the Borg, um, and I don't really want that.
00:32:41.720So they need to learn to just accept that this is how history, how human history operates.
00:32:51.140And I, I think there's, there's also a distinction to be made between eugenics.
00:32:59.140And I, and I don't, I don't mean that in terms of like a eugenic program administered by the state or sterilization, all that kind of stuff.
00:33:08.560I mean, just a, you know, making again, breeding better is literally what the word means.
00:33:14.280It's there, there's a notion that we did get better as human beings, you know, like our.
00:33:21.500Uh, hominid ancestors were, they might've been kind of more bad-ass than we are, but they're not as intelligent.
00:33:30.620They're not going to appreciate Beethoven's knife and we are better.
00:33:36.360And we did that to some, to a large degree through breeding.
00:33:40.660And it's not, it's not just like we had a, you know, culture obviously matters tremendously, but it was, we bred better people.
00:33:47.680And, and then this also kind of notion of the birth rate and things like that, where, and you see like Elon doing this.
00:33:56.240I mean, Elon seems to be Elon Musk that has, it seems to be just a crazed narcissist who just wants to reproduce himself, you know, as many times as possible.
00:34:06.740Um, and, uh, and there, you know, there are many people like him, but, um, but they're all complaining about the birth rate.
00:34:14.580And like, we just all need to go out there and create more, you know, bipedal humanoids.
00:34:24.560And it's just like, we don't actually.
00:34:29.520And that, I think that could have some really bad effects like that.